The Sewers of Paris

My guest on this week's Sewers of Paris is writer/comedian Mano Agapion , whose work you may know from his appearances on Hacks and Bajillion Dollar Properties , his writing on the new Punky Brewster , or from his podcasts We Love Trash and Drag Her . Mano developed his sense of humor alongside the weirdest comedies he could find, growing up in an immigrant household, and for a long time thought t...

When you compare what queer life was like at the end of the 80s to the start of the 2000s, the differences are so shocking it’s hard to believe that those years are only separated by a single decade. The author and historian Hugh Ryan has a new book about the people who shaped that decade, entitled My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond . I spoke to Hugh back in 2020, when he...

You might’ve seen that I have a new video up on YouTube this week — it’s about the long hard fight for marriage equality, and how some Hollywood icons got involved in the cause . The battle for the freedom to marry has been very much on my mind lately, so I wanted to revisit an interview from 2022 with Chris Geidner . You may know Chris for his day job, reporting and writing on some of the most pr...

Next week sees the release of a new Supergirl movie, so for this week’s Sewers of Paris we’re diving into the archives to revisit my 2020 interview with artist Joe Philips . Joe’s illustrations of handsome, happy gay men were some of the first glimpses I got of gay life, back in the 90s when I was a teenager exploring the Internet. I remember finding his art both sexy and wholesome, showing scanti...

For this week’s episode, we have two guests: Andrew Klaus-Vineyard and Daniel Talbott are the directors of a new documentary short called Welcome to Tool Shed , which opens to the door to an iconic leather bar in Palm Springs. They’re just back from showing the film at Cannes, and it’ll be popping up at film festivals around the world in the coming months. Daniel and Andrew are longtime collaborat...

My guest this week is Caleb Roehrig, author of young adult mysteries and the occasional romance. Caleb had always wanted to be an author, but life intervened and he found himself living in LA, working as a producer on reality TV shows. He didn’t realize it at the time, but that work was a training ground for storytelling. Though he still might not have figured it out until an economic crisis force...

The world just celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday — born in late April, a scant four hundred and sixty two years ago, which makes him almost as old as this podcast. Over the years we’ve had many guests on The Sewers of Paris for whom Shakespeare’s work was an inspiration, and this week we’ll hear my 2021 with Jeffrey Masters — then the host of the acclaimed podcast LGBTQ&A , and now a senior pr...

My guest this week on The Sewers of Paris is Jes Battis , who’s just written an appreciation and analysis of the movie Labyrinth entitled It’s Only Forever . Labyrinth turns 40 this year, which marks 40 years of Jes’ particular fascination with the goblin characters — and wondering why he’s always felt so eager to descend into their weird scrungly world. Fortunately, writing a book about it provid...

To mark the recent re-re-re-rebooting of The Muppet Show , this week we’re heading into the Sewers archives to revisit my 2020 interview with Dan Steadman. Dan grew up in a household that was so religious, his parents forbade him from watching certain episodes of The Muppet Show , due to a guest appearance by Alice Cooper. His upbringing in a sheltered religious community found him placed in a lot...

A few weeks ago I came across an online video from a comic convention featuring a phalanx of comic book figures — life-size statues, painted to look like they’d walked off the pages of a comic book. Their creator is Greg Maraio , an actor and artist in Boston who fills his time between shows with this unique project that’s turned into an artistic calling … though for many years, it seemed like it...

The day this episode comes out, March 26 2026, is the 115th birthday of renowned playwright Tennessee Williams. And to mark the occasion, we’re heading into the Sewers archives to hear my 2020 interview with writer William V. Madison, whose career was inspired in part by a moving experience in college involving a Streetcar Named Desire . That brought William to a series of adventurous jobs, from w...

My guest this week is illustrator Ricardo Bessa , whose beautiful art features lush colorful fantasy settings and characters on fabulous adventures, often very queer. Ricardo knew he was a fish out of water in the town where he grew up, and planned to move to London to find others like him … and that worked, at first, but he didn’t count on running into burnout that nearly ended his career.

On last week’s episode we heard from drag comedienne Pissi Myles, and this week we’ll hear from Pissi’s husband, photographer and creative director David Ayllon . David’s specialty is weird colorful visions that lean heavily on the spooky, the queer, and the poppiest of pop art — a career that he thought he’d blown after one particularly disastrous interview and a years-long search for something t...

My guest this week is drag comedienne Pissi Myles , who always knew she needed to be on stage but wasn’t always sure where she fit in… thanks to a music theater education that left her feeling like she couldn’t measure up to her classmates, and comparing herself to the host of Blues Clues . That is, until she discovered a wig and heels and her calling, which these days involves ruining showbiz cla...

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Pokémon, and to celebrate we’re diving into the Sewers archives to hear my 2019 chat with Cody Shipman . Cody’s a graphic designer and artist here in Seattle whose work is very beautiful, very gay, and very explicit. For a long time, he felt hesitant about blending his gay interests and his nerdy interests together. But it was when he finally...

This week, I’m welcoming back Randy West , who was my guest in the Sewers of Paris way back in 2017 . Randy is a TV industry veteran whose voice you might recognize from announcing on shows like The Price is Right , Supermarket Sweep , Big Brother , and countless others. From his decades behind a microphone, Randy’s been present for the creation of a lot of iconic TV shows, and these days he’s hel...

My guest this week is Steven Salvatore , author of young adult romances like And They Lived… , No Perfect Places , and When Love Gives You Lemons . Steven’s plan, when he was younger, was to be an artist… until a cruel art teacher crushed his dreams. But that set the stage for him to discover a passion for writing, and for exploring stories about young queer people in love. We’ll have that intervi...

My guest this week is game developer Tim Cain, who’s shown us what the end of the world looks like. Back in the mid-90s, Tim was working with a small team on a post-apocalyptic game with a 1950s aesthetic — a weird mix of styles that Tim was worried would bomb so hard he expected his next job would be serving fast food. But … that game was Fallout, which became a massive phenomenon, with multiple...

My guest this week is Massachusetts State Senator Julian Cyr , whose district includes Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket — a situation he never expected to find himself in. As a teenager, Julian was mainly focused on singing, and planned to pursue a career in the humanities. But when budget cuts threatened local arts programs, he organized people to speak up, and discovered he had a knack...

My guest this week is queer artist and illustrator Cheyne Gallarde , whose style blends drag icons with classic comic book covers. Cheyne first discovered drag in queer bars of Hawaii, and after a memorable night getting pulled up onstage, he started translating the magic that he saw in the community into literal super powers. We’ll have that interview in a moment. First a quick reminder that I ho...

Congratulations to actor-writer-comedian Joel Kim Booster, who got married last month to his partner John. You might know Joel as the writer and star of the movie Fire Island , or as a voice actor in KPop Demon Hunters , or from shows like Big Mouth , Search Party , and Loot . But before all that, Joel was a guest on The Sewers of Paris , way back in 2017, when we talked about his childhood, his c...

You may know this week’s guest from his online persona, The Black Gay Comic Geek — an identity that grew out of his Buffy fandom, which was so intense that for a time he was an administrator of a Buffy role-playing community where he was a magic shop owner and queen of the vengeance demons. These days, Michael flies around the country covering pop culture, always looking for his great passions: Bl...

My guest this week is author Jumata Emill , whose new novel is entitled I Don’t Wish You Well . It’s about a true-crime writer who uncovers a queer coverup in his hometown — based in part on Jumata’s prior work as a real-life crime reporter, before he made the jump to fiction. We’ll have that interview in a moment. First, a quick heads up that I have a new video out about the making of the Jinkx M...

I can think of few better ways to spend the holidays than seeing some live queer theater, whether it’s Golden Girls Live, a sing-along to Mame, or shows with some of my local Seattle drag legends like Dina Martina and Scott Shoemaker . And one of the most iconic holiday duos to emerge from the Emerald City is Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme . Every year they create a new holiday show and tour it ar...

My guest this week is Steven Milliken, author of a book of autobiographical essays entitled Late Bloomer Baby Boomer . Steven was a class clown who grew up to become a teacher in some fairly rough schools, and had to move in and out of the closet over the years as he navigated sensitive careers alongside alcoholism and sobriety We’ll have that interview in a moment. First, a quick heads up that I...